Republicans in the state say the former Godfather’s Pizza CEO has been completely absent since the Ames Straw Poll in mid-August and while the other candidates have focused on infrastructure and identifying their supporters, Cain has not done any of the things necessary to win the caucuses.

“He’s not locking up any primary support. Polls are just a number,” said Robinson. “He needs to have identified supporters he can communicate with. He has nothing; he has no idea who his supporters are.”

A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Iowa caucus-goers shows that Cain is in front with 28% followed by former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney at 21%. Congressman Ron Paul is a distant third at 10% followed by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich at 9%, Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann at 8%, and Texas Governor Rick Perry at 7%. The sixth place finish for Perry is a sharp decline from early September when Perry was the frontrunner both nationally and in Iowa. (To see survey question wording, click here).

Former Senator Rick Santorum picks up 4% of the vote and former Governor Jon Huntsman is at 2%. Another 4% would prefer some other candidate and 8% are not sure.

Herman Cain has spent minimal time in Iowa and other early states in recent months, as we’ve noted, but he has vowed to step up his efforts – and he’s sending a signal with a major hire in the Hawkeye State today.

Cain has hired Steve Grubbs, a veteran operative and former Republican Party of Iowa chairman, to lead his state effort there.

“We tried a community organizer as president, maybe it’s time we put a CEO in the White House,” said Grubbs in a statement. “I’ve had the good fortune to work with Bob Dole, Steve Forbes and Tommy Thompson and I can honestly say that I’ve never quite seen the groundswell of excitement that I’m seeing for Herman Cain.”

In 1995, Cain held a joint press conference on welfare reform with one of his current primary rivals, Newt Gingrich. Cain, representing the NRA, pledged that the group would work to help provide jobs for former welfare recipients. Also present at the press conference was a Domino’s executive: “When Herman Cain can come to Washington and say the word ‘Domino’s,’ we are clearly on the road to reconciliation,” cracked Gingrich, according to the Omaha World-Herald. It was not a one-time flirtation with the matter for Cain. In 1997, in a Birmingham News piece headlined “Pizza CEO: Restaurants Willing to Hire the Homeless,” Cain was quoted on the reality of hiring former welfare recipients. “It takes them longer than typical employees. We as companies must do all we can to help. If that means training them or whatever it takes to bridge the gap, so be it,” he said.

Former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi died of wounds suffered on Thursday as fighters battling to complete an eight-month-old uprising against his rule overran his hometown Sirte, Libya’s interim rulers said.

His killing, which came swiftly after his capture near Sirte, is the most dramatic single development in the Arab Spring revolts that have unseated rulers in Egypt and Tunisia and threatened the grip on power of the leaders of Syria and Yemen.

Obama has answered his own question as to why the Republicans oppose his plan. As quoted in the Washington Post on October 7, the President explains: “Each time, what we’ve seen is games-playing, a preference to try to score political points rather than actually get something done.” The Posthelpfully elaborated on the President’s message as, “while he has worked to improve the economy, the Republican opposition has chosen a strategy focused on denying him a second term rather than putting the country back to work.”

Note that Reagan never accused his Congressional opponents of opposing him in bad faith, rather than over disagreements of principle. But that accusation of bad faith opposition from the Republicans is the centerpiece of Obama’s desperate campaign now to avoid fatal political responsibility for the increasingly 1930s style results of Obamanomics. Instead of supporting what will work to get the country back to work, it is Obama who is pursuing a political strategy to blame the Republicans for the bad economy if they don’t support yet another warmed over version of his repeatedly failed, braindead, Keynesian economics, which the voters elected them to stop in 2010.

If Obama cannot understand the economic reasons why Republicans must oppose his wasteful and ineffective jobs plan, then he doesn’t have the smarts to lead the country after all, and all he could do to help end the misery is resign. And if Obama is just playacting that he cannot understand any reason for opposing his jobs plan other than political bad faith, then he should be asked to resign for that disgraceful political manipulation in the midst of this dramatic national crisis.

Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you are paying attention. Democrats in Washington are turning up the heat on the GOP as they push for quick passage of the “mini” $35 billion union jobs bailout. True to Alinsky form, Team Obama is spinning more emo-narratives centered on saving teachers from layoffs. At a Save the Teachers and Children! press conference yesterday, Senate Dems poured it on thick for their Big Labor pals. So did Joe Biden, who schmoozed it up with a class of fourth graders before turning on the fear-mongering spigot. Ignoring the billions in taxpayer dollars that he’s redistributed to the National Education Association’s pet causes over the last three years, the campaigner-in-chief took to the classroom to bemoan that “We have a tendency to say great things about how important education is in the abstract, but we don’t always put our money where our mouth is.”

As I spotlighted last week, President Obama’s marquee jobless teacher/poster boy for the union jobs bailout is a Boston educator who is NOT jobless. And all the little lies serve the larger Obama fraud of endless Keynesian intervention as a “cure” — which I’ve hit on again in my new column this week.

Last week, the great minds of the OWS movement, bored with playing bocce ball and getting stoned, decided to protest at the homes of Wall Street’s robber barons. They then proceeded to walk right past George Soros’ apartment building in order to protest at the homes of Rupert Murdoch and David Koch.

THEY’RE NOT WALL STREET!

You may not like Koch and Murdoch’s products — fertilizer and media — but neither one has anything to do with Wall Street. Unlike money manipulators such as John Corzine (Democrat), Robert Rubin (Democrat) and George Soros (Democrat and Obama’s biggest supporter), Koch and Murdoch make money from corporations that actually produce something.

They take risks, make things and get menaced by the government. Wall Street schemers take no risks, produce nothing and get bailed out by the government.

Even assuming, for purposes of argument, that Koch and Murdoch are as evil as these morons seems to think, the protesters call their demonstration “Occupy Wall Street,” not “Occupy Businesses Whose Products We Disapprove Of.”

This would be like protesting the Holocaust by walking past Adolf Hitler’s house and protesting at O.J. Simpson’s house.

The Flea Partiers try to win good will by pretending to protest “Wall Street” — but they ignore Wall Street’s villains. They claim to speak for 99 percent of Americans, but their sponsor, George Soros, would be delighted if America collapsed and the 99 percent were impoverished. All he cares about is his own power and pocketbook.

Over the past month there have been many comparisons between the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Here is one comparison that the Mainstream Media will not make. The MSM worked very hard to brand the Tea Party Movement as Racist, but it wasn’t. They are working just as hard to ignore the blatant Antisemitism and libelous demonization of Israel coming out of the Occupy Wall Street protests, and they are.

It is not just a few nuts within the Occupy Wall Street Movement who are bashing Israel and Jews, it is the leadership and founders, yet our President and the rest of the Democratic Party are practically tripping over their underwear in a rush to embrace these haters.

The GOP lawmakers highlighted the scoldinga federal judge gave the Fish and Wildlife Service last month over testimony in defense of a plan to protect a tiny fish called delta smelt by diverting water in California away from farmland.GOP reps confronted the Obama Administraion over their junk science misconduct in an official letter.
FOX News reported:

Several Republican lawmakers are challenging the Obama administration’s science czar over what they claim are repeat incidents of “scientific misconduct” among agencies, questioning whether officials who deal with everything from endangered species to nuclear waste are using “sound science.”

***

This is so depressing and vile, yet oh-so predictable. I’m too disgusted to comment further —

In one of the most cruel and vicious personal attacks you’ll ever read, today’s New York Times pretends to wring its oh-so sensitive hands over the following – while their true agenda is much more insidious:

It is safe to say that no other Republican on the campaign trail this year — or ever — has begun a speech with the phrase “Awww, shucky ducky!” the way Herman Cain did[.] …

Few candidates compare themselves to a flavor of ice cream, but Mr. Cain is intent on letting people know that he is like “Häagen-Dazs black walnut,” the point being that he is certainly not a flavor of the week because it “tastes good all the time.”

Mr. Cain, who is black, has a penchant for gold ties because, as he explains with flirtatious flair, “that color happens to look good against this beautiful dark skin.” …

He has no qualms, for instance, about playing off black clichés: should he become president, his Secret Service codename should be “Cornbread,” he wrote in his memoir[.]

I love how the typically humorless NYTs columnist drones without irony, “Cain, who is black”….I’d laugh if the whole purpose of the tedious handwringing wasn’t to actually to push a highly toxic narrative:

Here’s what Politico and the New York Times are really up to…

The rise of Herman Cain means that if the MSM is going to hold tight to negative narratives regarding conservatives, (and especially the tea party) that they’ve spent years crafting and are counting on to help re-elect Barack Obama, they must do two things:

1. Toxify Herman Cain in the Black community in the same way they toxified Justice Clarence Thomas. Obama’s Media Palace Guards have to strip Cain of his identity as a Black American and tag him as a sell-out. Otherwise, he could become a magnet to other Blacks and that would literally be the end of the Democrat Party.

2. Keep alive the idea that conservatives and especially tea partiers are racist by portraying Cain as the kind of “minstrelsly,” sell out white racists are willing to accept.

If Cain were a liberal Democrat these exact same jokes and folksy sayings of his would be portrayed by the race-baiters at the New York Times and Politico as a Black man proudly holding on to his identity, culture, heritage, and background — which, obviously, is exactly what it is. But to portray Cain in that manner, as a Black Republican comfortable with who he is among conservatives, won’t further the two goals listed above. In fact, reporting the truth would have the exact opposite effect. So the narrative simply cannot be allowed to become “Tea Party Republicans accept Black man in their fold.” Because that kind of narrative is an existential threat to all things Leftist. The Left’s allies at the New York Times and Politico know this and, as we see here, are taking the mercenary action necessary to try and snuff this threat. And so they will twist this truth into something unabashedly cruel — into a minstrel show.

***

Sigh… stop trying to please the left, Mr. Cain – it will get you into trouble every time.

Former Senator Rick Santorum responded to Cain’s remarks by issuing a statement saying Cain is not fully pro-life:

“Herman Cain said that he believes life begins at conception, but that it’s up to the individual to decide whether or not to terminate that life. And I find it gravely troubling that Herman believes it’s a life, but that he doesn’t consider it a life worth fighting for. As the author of the partial birth abortion ban and other pro-life pieces of legislation, this is the exact mentality myself and other true pro-life advocates fought against. In fact, Herman’s pro-choice position is similar to those held by John Kerry, Barack Obama and many others on the liberal left. No, Herman, it is not ‘whatever they decide,’this is an innocent human life. It is unconscionable for Herman to run for the nomination of the Party that stands in defense of Life while showing disregard for the sanctity of Life. You cannot be both personally against abortion while condoning it – you can’t have it both ways. We must defend the defenseless, period.”

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